Beauty and the beast

Page Tools

Related

As Byron Bay groans under the weight of tourists, Catharine Munro
discovers that the conservation-minded coastal town's greatest
problem is itself.

Last Australia Day was a surprisingly sedate affair in
Byron Bay, the nation's counter-culture capital - to a point. The
mayor swore in citizens, barbecues burnt and residents gathered to
dig deep for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami.

The setting for the fund-raiser was the giant Beach Hotel, where
proprietor John "Strop" Cornell sells dandy-cinos - dandelion
cappuccinos as well as boutique beer. The peak summer season, when
the town's population swells from 6,000 to 30,000, had almost
passed and with it the flood of tourists that is as challenging to
holiday towns as it is lucrative.

Byron Bay's residents amassed $97,000 at the charity auction in
response to the Asian disaster, but midway through the event, they
added their own special ingredient - staging an unplanned boycott
against Public Enemy No. 1, retail magnate Gerry Harvey. In these
emerald hills that nurture political dissent, it was a predictable
response from a community that wants to preserve its eccentric,
eclectic and, these days, exclusive appeal.

Back on that late January day, bidding stopped when a $700
weekend at Harvey's new luxury resort Byron @ Byron went under
the hammer. No one was interested in supporting the generosity of
the donor, no matter how desperate the international crisis, or how
environmentally sympathetic his development. Harvey had personally
attacked Byron Bay's councillors, claiming one needed a "good bath"
and that the mayor, Jan Barham, was "emotional". Most importantly,
he had defied council regulations during the construction of his
hotel. His tactics were seen as bullying.

In Byron Bay, even an Australia Day fund-raiser for a tragedy
can turn political. Consequently the bidding boycott was debated in
the letters pages of the local newspaper, The Echo. Resident
Duncan Dey wrote that he was "delighted" at the absence of bidding
and congratulated the town for "rejecting Gerry's misbehaviour".
Christine Luck said she wished local issues had been put aside for
the "bigger and more important problem".

But the boycott was futile because Harvey's resort was already
doing business; the horse had already bolted.

Harvey is now the least of this conservation-minded community's
problems. No longer is it just a case of targeted battles against
individual developers, the most famous being Club Med during the
1990s. Byron's problem is that it has simply become too
popular.

No one knows how many tourists flock to Byron Bay each year -
estimates range from between 1.2 million and 1.75 million - but
mayor Barham recognises that the shire is at risk of losing its
character as a result. "I have seen a lot of people leave the area
because of the pressure on quality of life," she says. "If people
leave because they don't feel that the place nurtures them in their
daily life, that then creates the potential for Byron Bay to lose
its soul."

So overcrowded has the town become that a council report now
admits it is being "controlled" by tourism. "Byron has a reputation
as a party town," police inspector Ian Fitzsimmons says. "The
family element has gone. I think the crowds are starting to outgrow
what Byron Bay can provide for them. People come and sleep in their
cars because accommodation is booked out completely."

Two of the town's three pubs have 3am licences and there are now
five nightclubs open just as late. Saturday night can turn ugly,
and police often have to deal with gatherings of more than 1000
revellers on the street. Former mayor Tom Wilson believes a failure
to develop a tourism policy during the 1990s has left the town
bulging with budget travellers; too many hostels were given
permission to operate.

"The streets of Byron at night are not a good sight," he says.
"It's become backpacker dominated. Consents were given out without
a plan in the mid-1990s and the fruits of those consents are coming
back to haunt us."

Market forces have driven out the quirky character of the
town, which has long been its drawcard. Salons still offer colonic
irrigation as casually as a manicure, but on the main street the
offbeat is nowhere to be seen. Jonson Street, where retail rents
are up there with those in Sydney's upmarket Strand Arcade,
resembles any suburban main drag. Byron Bay may have resisted
McDonald's but now you can buy a Subway sandwich, a Domino's pizza
and a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream. "Drunks' tucker", as the local
police call it, has replaced alfalfa salad.

Hostel managers insist it's schoolies and the daytrippers who
create the party-town atmosphere, not their backpacking guests.
"They [backpackers] are a little disappointed when they come here
and find it's less of an alternative lifestyle than they imagined,"
says Main Beach Backpackers' James Robinson-Gale. "They are always
looking to get off the beaten track."

The party-town phenomenon has also sparked a local rebellion
with residents forming Byron Residents Against Community Erosion
(BRACE) to campaign against school-leavers renting holiday houses
in residential zones. Founder Glenn Lawrence, a small-business
operator who lives in a quiet street overlooking the ocean, has
spent the Christmas holidays in a state of siege since
school-leavers started renting the house next door three years ago.
He has spent $11,000 on double glazing and has swapped the Pacific
Ocean breeze for air-conditioning in order to block out the party
noise that thumps every night for the four weeks. "At the moment
it's illegal to have holiday lettings in residential areas," he
says. "Council is not enforcing the law."

The mayor's response is to propose selling licences to home
owners who want to let their houses for the holidays. But the
pressure to charge high holiday rents continues because property
values keep rising. The median house price in the Byron shire has
doubled to $400,000 in just three years. And large groups of
school-leavers are increasingly replacing families as holiday
tenants.

The biggest source of pressure is the freeway to Brisbane that
opened in mid-2003. A visit south from Queensland now takes 1
hours, encouraging more daytrippers. Heavy traffic is a serious
problem. The council says traffic flow has risen by a third in 12
years. Jams are legendary, as cars line up to enter Byron Bay along
its only road into town. At Christmas and Easter, the cars back up
four kilometres.

Council officials say a bypass road would alleviate a bottleneck
at the centre of town, but plans are yet to be approved. Barham
favours a "softer" response. Rather than build a road, she would
like residents to leave their cars in a parking lot outside town,
but even approval for that is months away. Local business owners
say a new road is more than a decade overdue. "We need to take the
pressure off the centre of town," says Peter Noble, the director of
next weekend's hugely popular East Coast Blues & Roots
festival. "If you balance out the amount of carbon dioxide that
enters the area as a result of traffic jams when there are 30,000
people in town, then I'm sure it's a greener outcome."

Noble spends $75,000 managing traffic when 15,000 people
converge on Red Devil Park, a field on the southern side of town,
for the five-day annual event. Anything other than building another
road amounts to living in denial, he says.

Byron is so popular because it is beautiful, breathtakingly so.
Ironically, the presence of dirty industry in the past may have
played a part in keeping the place underdeveloped for tourism.
Until the early 1980s most visitors stayed away because a meatworks
discharged offal and blood into waterways and a putrid stench into
the air.

"Some people see it as a cosmic, karmic thing," Barham says.
"Caring for the place is in contrast to its history."

Since then, Green councils, fearing another Gold Coast, have
kept high-rises out. Development has been limited by a policy
called the Rural Settlement Strategy that allows a rate of growth
that the local ecology can handle. A moratorium has been placed on
development since August 1997 because the town's sewerage system
has reached its capacity. The new system, which puts sanitised
effluent back into artificial wetlands, is not due to open until
the end of the year.

But only big players are now able to take on the council,
developer Eric Freeman says. He has spent $500,000 getting the
necessary approvals to build 32 townhouses. Like Gerry Harvey, he
has avoided the moratorium on development by building his own
sewerage system. "Only if your project is large enough to justify
spending half a million dollars to gain the approvals is it worth
it," Freeman says.

While hordes of daytrippers, backpackers and school-leavers
might be the bane of town life in Byron, a very different onslaught
is occurring in the hills - the arrival of the sea changers. For
years, filmmakers, writers and businessmen have been quietly
snapping up dairy farms, joining the hippies who established
communes in the 1960s.

Two years ago, Jeni Caffin left her "square of concrete" in
Annandale and her lucrative position with a major publisher to live
on a farm with her partner, an IT consultant. She has found enough
local writers in the shire to represent them as a literary
agent.

Best-selling author Di Morrissey, men's issues columnist Alan
Close and novelists Robert Drew and Marelle Day are all residents.
But life in paradise is not perfect. Caffin misses her evenings at
the Opera House and wearing frocks to work. And she could do
without the "obsession" the local wildlife has with entering her
house. (She has perfected the art of catching cane toads, using a
pool scoop and David Jones bag to collect them and kill them
humanely by freezing them to death.)

So rich is Byron's cultural life that Sotheby's art auctioneer
Robert Bleakley, who moved his family to Mullumbimby seven years
ago, believes it is as vibrant as any artistic community he has
known. Sydney jewellery designer Victoria Spring admits that her
decision to move onto 110 acres outside Byron five years ago was a
"cheater's" version of living in the country. " I moved here
because my kids could grow up in wide open spaces and also receive
a good education and I didn't want to be cut off. This is almost
the second wave of people who want an alternative lifestyle. We are
the kids of the hippies."

Spring worries about the money coming into the area. "It changes
the complexion of the area and it could go either way," she says.
While urbanites may demand changes that iron out Byron Shire's
interesting wrinkles, they also bring in fresh ideas and are in a
position to finance innovative programs, such as the Uncle Project,
which provides male mentors for boys growing up without
fathers.

The artistic drive allows a level of whimsy that other rural
areas may envy. Byron's music scene is well-known enough but even
on weeknights in the sleepy town of Brunswick Heads, there is a
choice of acoustic performances to listen to while eating alfresco.
However, despite the love, peace and harmony promoted by many in
Byron's community, activists are constantly brawling with one
another, says former Green councillor Hugh Ermacora. "I got
perpetually frustrated by the number of times I put up green
proposals only to be defeated by Green councillors," he says.

The further into the hills, the deeper the resistance to
economic growth. Even the most eco-friendly of developers faces
stiff opposition to business plans.

Danielle Leonard came to Byron Bay to lead an alternative life
by making a living growing and selling organic produce. She
believes growth is inevitable and wants to find some middle ground
between the cowboy developers and the dogged conservationists. "You
can't stop people needing a house or having babies," she says.
Backed by American heiress Elaine Seiler, she has established the
Regenesis farm, an operation that employs permaculture to
regenerate the land damaged by dairy farming. Chemicals are off
limits and she even avoids fossil fuels, instead running machinery
on cooking oil wherever possible.

To finance the farm, Leonard dabbled in land speculation. She
chose sites in the hotbed of Byron counter-culture, the hinterland
village of Main Arm, to build eco-friendly developments that would
be sold to wealthy investors. The locals are furious. "It's just
more population, more population, more population," rails resident
opponent Nick Gazzard. Meanwhile, the council is "sitting on the
fence" over whether to approve her plans.

Leonard argues that the old hippie culture, which started in
earnest with the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973, needs a new
economy in order to survive. "The counter-culture was previously
backed by growing marijuana and supported by the dole," she says.
"People could protest and make art. But the dole no longer supports
that lifestyle and is driving a lot of people out. In order to not
love Byron to death we have to preserve what's important and create
an economic basis as well as being vigilant about inappropriate
growth."

Step back in time

1770: Captain Cook sails past and names Cape Byron as a
tribute to his fellow navigator, Vice-Admiral John Byron,
grandfather of the famous poet. The area was called Cavvanba,
meaning meeting place, by the local Arakawal and Minjangbal
tribes.

1930s: The sand miners arrive, stripping beaches from
Ballina to Brunswick Heads and leaving a legacy of erosion.

1954: Byron Bay Whaling Company takes its first whale,
but the industry closes in 1962. During this time 1146 whales are
processed producing 10,000 tonnes of oil.

1960s: Surfers discover Byron's breaks.

1973: The Aquarius Festival is held in the town of
Nimbin. Some who attended will stay in the district and establish
communes in Mullumbimby and Main Arm.

1970s: The NSW dairy industry is deregulated, eventually
reducing the number of farms in northern NSW from 4000 to the 260
it has today. Tax laws help a new generation of farmers, some from
the city, and see horticulture flourishing, particularly macadamia,
avocado, tea tree and bush food producers.

1983: The meatworks close, enhancing Byron Bay's
reputation as a holiday destination, but also putting 360 people
out of work.

1991: John Cornell opens the renovated Beach Hotel.

1996: Council wins a four-year battle in the Land and
Environment Court against a development by Club Med. The land is
sold to the Melbourne-based Becton Corporation. The company remains
determined to develop the site.